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inventinG the disCiPline while you break it all down: 
an essay in memory oF brian sutton-smith

AnnA beresin

After I stumbled across his 1986 book, Toys as Culture, in a bookstore in Boston, 
I moved to Philadelphia to study with Brian Sutton-Smith. Jointly appointed in the 
Department of Folklore and at the Graduate School of Education at the University 
of Pennsylvania, he ran the Interdisciplinary Study of Human Development 
program with a giddy seriousness that kept students at the edge of their seats. His 
reading lists there were the most varied I ever encountered, and this essay offers a 
miniature reading list in order to share the breadth of his genius.

Psychology, particularly Freudian psychology and cognitive psychology, was 
the base discipline in my independent studies with him. As admirers of D.W. 
Winnicott, Erik Erikson, and Jean Piaget, he had all of his students challenge 
psychology’s assumptions by reading ethnographies of Mead, Benedict, 
LeVine, and Whiting. For our children’s culture bible, we had Schwartzman’s 
Transformations: The Anthropology of Children’s Play, and with it, the folkloristic 
historical collections of Iona and Peter Opie, along with William Wells Newell’s 
paradoxes. Folklore and anthropology were his answers to the erroneous, 
wide brush strokes of psychology, the neatened, expurgated versions of actual 
childhoods, the boredom of the textbook approach to child development. We 
would share fart jokes. As important as reading widely was to him, so were 
his reminiscences of his own childhood. His favorite New Zealand recipe for 
guaranteed farting: fish and chips and raisins.

Trickery itself, to be found in the study of the festival, from Bakhtin to Falassi 
to Stallybrass and Whyte, emphasized to Brian that the core of play is dialogic, 
paradoxical, a “world turned upside down” (Stallybrass and White 1986). Bateson 
was our guide to meta-communication, Foucault our mirror to meta-historical 
analysis. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) introduced the very idea of the invention 
of tradition, Huizinga (1949) the magic frame of play, and Goffman (1959), the 
idea that as one plays within a frame, one plays the frame as well. The message: 
challenge assumptions, study real children and their folklore for counter narratives, 
ask who is being served by the adult perceptions of reality. Play with the form of 
research. Study animals; examine evolution. Keep an eye on the playground and 
on video games. They keep us honest.

One of Sutton-Smith’s own essays that deserves more attention than it has been 
given is the seminal “Games of Order and Disorder” (1972). He had described 
games as “models of power,” yet games were no simple copies of adult culture. 
Through his eyes we see play emerge as a methodology of inversion. And so 
he began to use inversion and dialogism as a way to break down the very field 
he was crafting. The game of academia was not just increased knowledge, but 
disordering the lot as you build it.

Challenging Huizinga, Sutton-Smith noted play is not always voluntary. 
Sometimes you play the game everyone else is playing, because you must, in 

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order to play at all. Answering Caillois, he demonstrated that game text in one 
culture could be in a totally different genre in another.

Dueling Piaget, he cautioned against pitting assimilation over accommodation. 
Piaget’s model did not account for destruction; it was too focused on a limited 
concept of progress. Hollering at educational catch phrases, he observed that the 
opposite of play is not work. He hated the line, “Play is the child’s work.” It is far 
more complicated than work, or not work. It is what children do. A child who does 
not play is a child who is ill. Play is more like dreaming, than work. Play is more 
like art or religion, a symbolic field of communication that makes life worthwhile 
and mysterious. He noted that play’s opposite is not work; it is depression. 
Examining the idea of play as progress, he stated that children are not “the future.” 
They are in their own time, and their time here and now deserves to be playful. 
We can say he built a discipline of play while challenging his own and everyone 
else’s assumptions. Play was “ambiguous” as was the very enterprise of knowledge 
building. To be human is to live in ambiguity, and adapt to new contexts.

Brian loved bad jokes, old songs, fast footwork, and children’s stories. There 
were worlds within worlds in children’s folk arts, and he wrote about things that 
others found trivial with the zeal of the art collector. His mission was to protect 
children’s right to be surreal, incorrect, and off-center, and to honor error as a 
path to thought, art, and vitality. For his best writing, see his 1961 novel, Smitty 
Does a Bunk, and learn more about his childhood adventures with his very real, 
very loved brother. The novel centers around the adventures of brothers Brin 
and Smitty; Brian was clearly the younger Brin, his brother, the elder Smitty. 
Brin continuously sang and most of all wanted to be included, an observer of 
childhood within a children’s story.

Brian often recited excerpts of his Folkstories of Children (1981), rapturously 
quoting the children’s words when he wanted to demonstrate the skill children 
offer within their folklore. It seems fitting to take us here, words he collected from 
a four-year-old:

Once upon a time the once upon a time ate the once upon a time 
Which ate the once upon a time

And then the once upon a time which ate the once upon a time  
Ate the princess once upon a time with the king

And then the once upon a times died 
Then the end ate the end

the end
the end
then the end died
then the end died
then the end died
then the end died
and then the end the end the end died
the end with a the end
the end
the end (Sutton-Smith 1981:114)

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Yet the end of a life is not the end of a life’s work. Brian particularly loved 
Rabelais, that 500 year-old writer of Gargantua and Pantagruel, or as I like to 
think of Rabelais, as the precursor of Jonathan Swift and the inventor of Cookie 
Monster. Although these words were written by French scholar Denis Saurat as an 
introduction to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; every word rings true for 
Brian (note the present tense):

As for his mind, there is none better: he can argue with the subtlest 
… On education, we still go to him; and his criticism of the education 
of his day still largely holds good against ours today. Against useless 
erudition he is splendid … His enthusiasm for science is still an 
inspiration … Look at the absurdity of things and of men: and do not 
take it seriously: laugh. (Saurat 1945:iv)

What Rabelais is for the adult carnival, Brian is for the festival of children’s folklore 
in all its complexity, in all its grotesquery, in all its variation. A privilege to have 
studied with him, to have dueled with his brain, I have come to think of Brian as 
the most intelligent, most well-read 11 year-old that ever lived. Like Rabelais, “As 
for his mind, there is none better.”

WORKS CITED

Bahktin, Mikhail M. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballentine.
Benedict, Ruth. 1973. An Anthropologist at Work. New York: Avon.
Falassi, Alessandro. 1987. Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival. Albuquerque: 

University of New Mexico Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 

(1972-1977). New York: Pantheon.
Freud, Sigmund. 1916. Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, 

Yard, and Co.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York. 

Doubleday.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terrance Ranger. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. 

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Huizinga, Johan. 1949. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. 

London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
LeVine, Robert. 1973. Culture, Behavior, and Personality. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Mead, Margaret. 1953. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive 

Youth for Western Civilization. New York: Modern Library.
Newell, William Wells. 1884. Games and Songs of American Children. New York: 

Harper and Brothers.
Opie, Iona and Opie, Peter. 1967. The Lore and Language of School-Children. 

Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press.

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________. 1969. Children’s Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, 
Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Dueling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, 
Pretending. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press.

Piaget, Jean. 1962. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: W. W. 
Norton.

Saurat, Denis. 1945. “Introduction.” In Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francis 
Rabelais. London: John Westhouse.

Schwartzman, Helen. 1978. Transformations: The Anthropology of Children’s Play. 
New York: Plenum.

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. 
New York: Cornell University Press. 

Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1961. Smitty Does a Bunk. Wellington, NZ: Price Wilburn and 
Co.

________.1972. “Games of Order and Disorder.” Paper presented to the 
symposium on Forms of Symbolic Inversion at the American Anthropological 
Association, Toronto. 

________. 1977. “Dialectics of Play.” In Physical Activity and Human Well-Being, 
edited by Fernand Landry and William Andrew Robert Orban. Miami, FL: 
Symposia Specialists.

________. 1981. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press.

________. 1986. Toys as Culture. New York: Gardner Press.
________. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whiting, Beatrice Blyth, ed. 1963. Six Cultures: Studies of Child Rearing. New York: 

Wiley.
Winnicott, D.W. 1971. Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge.

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